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Anne Spencer (1882–1975)

Anne Spencer was a poet, a civil rights
activist, a teacher, a librarian, and a gardener. While fewer than thirty of her
poems were published in her lifetime, she was an important figure of the black
literary movement of the 1920s—the Harlem Renaissance—and only the second African
American poet to be included in the Norton Anthology of Modern
Poetry (1973). Noted for iambic verse preoccupied with biblical and
mythological themes, Spencer found fans in such Harlem heavyweights as James Weldon
Johnson, who commented on her "economy of phrase and compression of thought." In
addition to her writing, Spencer helped to found the Lynchburg chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP). She was also an avid gardener and hosted a salon at her
Lynchburg garden, which attracted prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Her
former residence is now a museum that is open to the public. MORE...

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Early Years

Spencer was born Annie Bethel Scales Bannister to Joel Cephus Bannister and Sarah
Louise Scales on February 6, 1882, on a farm in Henry County. Both parents were of mixed lineage. Her
father, born a slave in Henry County in 1862, was of black, white, and Seminole
Indian ancestry. Her mother was born in 1866 on Reynolds Plantation in Critz, in
neighboring Patrick County.
According to Spencer's biographer, J. Lee Greene, Sarah Louise Scales "was an
illegitimate child; her mother was a former slave and her father a wealthy
Virginia aristocrat … well known in American aristocracy of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries." Rumors passed down in the Spencer family have long suggested
that Sarah's father was a Reynolds, which would have made her a close relative of
R. J. Reynolds and J. Sargeant Reynolds.

Soon after Spencer was born, her family left their Henry County farm for Martinsville, where her father
opened a saloon. When Bannister's fervor for financial security clashed with his
wife's investment in morality, the couple separated. In 1886, Scales took Anne
with her to Bramwell, West
Virginia, but was unable to care for her. First, she placed Anne in the
foster care of William Dixie and his wife, a prominent black couple in Bramwell.
Then, in 1893, wanting a better education for her daughter, Scales enrolled the
eleven-year-old in the Virginia Theological Seminary and College (now Virginia University
of Lynchburg).

In Lynchburg

Although Spencer left Bramwell barely
literate, when she graduated from the Virginia Theological Seminary six years
later she was valedictorian of her class. While in school, Anne met Edward
Spencer, a fellow student who would become Lynchburg's first parcel postman. They
married in 1901 and the couple went on to have three children: Bethel, Alroy, and
Chauncey. (Later Chauncey Spencer would help to initiate the training program that
produced the Tuskegee Airmen.)

Spencer taught at her alma mater from 1910 until 1912. While there, she met and
tutored Ota Benga, a pygmy who
had been brought from the Belgian Congo and who had been placed on exhibit at the
1904 Saint Louis World's Fair and the Bronx Zoo for several years before being sent
to Lynchburg.

In 1924, Spencer was hired by the Jones Memorial Library's board of trustees to
work at the Dunbar High School library. Dunbar was Lynchburg's African American
high school and its library the only branch open to African Americans in the city.
Between these two jobs, Spencer spent much of her time writing and serving on
committees to improve the legal, social, and economic aspects of African
Americans' lives. During this time, Spencer also helped to establish the Lynchburg
chapter of the NAACP and led a campaign to hire black teachers in black
schools.

Literary Career

Spencer's work with the
NAACP brought James Weldon Johnson to town and launched Spencer's literary career.
Johnson was the Renaissance man of Harlem—a poet, diplomat, journalist,
anthropologist, teacher, lawyer, and songwriter—and he came to Lynchburg in 1919
in his capacity as a field agent for the NAACP. During his visit, he befriended
Spencer and encouraged her to publish her work. Spencer was as prolific a writer
as she was reticent about publishing. Her often idiosyncratic poems were, even to
Johnson, "perhaps too unconventional," and when H. L. Mencken offered to help her
publish them she turned him down. His criticism, coming as it did from a non-poet,
was unwelcome. Johnson, apparently, had a lighter touch, and Spencer was published
by such Harlem Renaissance publications as The Crisis, a
journal founded by the NAACP, and The Lyric, a magazine for
traditional poetry.

The relationship between Spencer's race, her politics, and her poetry is complex.
Although a civil rights activist, she opposed school integration as "tokenism,"
and she did not address the issues of African Americans in her poetry nearly as
often as did other Harlem Renaissance artists. Johnson once declared that
"practically none of her poetry has been motivated by race," and while that was an
exaggeration, Spencer seemed more protective of her artistry than of her race. She
explained her range of subject matter to Greene, saying, "I write about some of
the things I love. But have no civilized articulation for the things I hate."

In "White Things" (1923), one of her best known exceptions to Johnson's claim,
Spencer explored "whiteness" and how its supremacy is maintained only through the
violent destruction of all things colored. Spencer explained that she wrote the
poem in response to a lynching
she had read about—perhaps the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner in Valdosta,
Georgia—in which a pregnant woman and her unborn child were murdered. The poem
opens with the observation that "Most things are colorful things—the sky, earth,
and sea. / Black men are most men; but the white are free!"

Several lines later, the white "wand of power" has reduced the hills of "red and
darkened pine" to blanched wastelands and has turned the "blood in a ruby rose /
To a poor white poppy-flower." The poem's final verses turn from the
transformative devastation that whites inflict upon the "natural" world to the
violent "whitening" of blacks through their transmutation to ash and bone in the
act of lynching: They pyred a race of black, black men,And burned them to
ashes white; then,Laughing, a young one claimed a skull,For the skull
of a black is white, not dull …

Critic Keith Clark, in his essay on Anne Spencer in Notable
Black American Women, suggests "White Things" has come to be seen as "the
quintessential 'protest' poem." But given the graphic description and subject
matter, Spencer's editors at The Crisis found it unnerving
and asked for revisions. Typically, she refused.

At other times, Spencer eschewed politics for primroses. "Life-Long Poor Browning"
is at once a formally structured tribute to her favorite poet, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, and a mystic retreat into the natural world. Echoing Browning's
formality and constraint, she contrasts the precision of English
gardens—"Primroses, prim indeed, in quiet ordered hedges …"—to the riotous beauty
of Spencer's familiar Blue Ridge Mountains: Here canopied reaches of dogwood
and hazel,Beech tree and redbud fine-laced in vines,Fleet clapping
rills by lush fern and basil,Drain blue hills to lowlands scented with
pines …

According to Spencer's biographer, J. Lee Greene, she wrote constantly, "on paper
bags, in the margins and fly leaves of books, on envelopes, on tablets, on the
telephone bill, on the back of a check." "Dear Langston," addressed to her friend
and frequent correspondent Langston Hughes, appeared as a notation among Spencer's
papers. The poem seems to express frustration at her perceived inability to
complete anything. In the early 1970s, Spencer admitted to Greene that she had a
reputation for never answering letters, but she explained herself by saying, "I
answered every letter I ever received, though at times—too many times—that answer
did not get on the paper or in the mail."

The Garden Years

Spencer's fame increased
over the years, but not only because of her poetry. She called the cottage in her
large garden Edankraal, which combined her and her husband Edward's names with the
idea of sacred places such as the biblical Eden and the African kraal (an Afrikaans term for a native southern African village
community). As early as the 1920s, the Spencers turned Edankraal into an artists'
salon, hosting W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn
Brooks, among others. While Jim Crow laws prevented these Harlem Renaissance
luminaries from staying in Lynchburg's hotels, they could find hospitality and
intellectual stimulation with the Spencers. In this way, Spencer cemented her
influence on Harlem—all the way from Virginia.

Anne Spencer died of cancer in Lynchburg at the age of ninety-three on July 27,
1975. Her house and garden at 1313 Pierce Street are maintained and open for
tours. The Anne Spencer
House became incorporated shortly after the house was designated as a
Virginia Historic Landmark in the autumn of 1976.

1919
- James Weldon Johnson travels to Lynchburg as a field agent for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. During this time, he meets Anne Spencer and helps to launch her literary career.

March 1923
- Anne Spencer's poem "White Things" is published in The Crisis.

1924
- Anne Spencer is hired by the Jones Memorial Library board of trustees to work at the Dunbar High School library in Lynchburg.

July 27, 1975
- Anne Spencer dies of cancer.

1976
- The Anne Spencer House is designated as a Virginia Historic Landmark.